382 RüdigerKunow
signifiers. Take the simplest case, a sentence such as "I am in pain." A
declarative statement of this kind describes a particular subject position
which an embodied human being can find her- or himself "in"—the
"undiscovered countries" or the "kingdom of the ill," as Virginia Woolf
and Susan Sontag have independently from one another called it
(Sontag,IllnessasMetaphor3;Woolf,OnBeingIll3).
EmphaticEmbodiment
Ihavespokenofpainastheabsolute,emphaticNowofembodiment,
a particular mode of emphasis which manifests itself, as we have seen,
in affective intensities and an equally intense, questioning relationship
towards one's "own" body. Another way of saying this would be to
argue that pain—but also the other bodily conditions discussed in this
chapter, like life-threatening illnesses, mark moments when the "lived
here" (Husserl,The Idea of Phenomenology13) of the body becomes
urgent and problematic. Pain makes the body reflexive.^79 In what
follows, I will now attempt to link this reflexivity to questions of self
andsubjecthoodinmomentsofexceptionandemergency.
The situatedness of pain "in" the human body is quite a traditional
mode of thinking and has served as the basis for a wide range of
theories, both of pain and of subjecthood. The central point about these
theories, which cannot all be rehearsed here, is that the experience of
physical or mental pain is seen not just as one bodily condition like
many others (which is why I am speaking of an emphatic Now) but at
the same time as a very personal, even private here and now of living.
David B. Morris's reflections on this topic can stand for many others
when he defines pain as "a subjective experience, perhaps an archetype
of subjectivity, felt only within the solitude of our individual minds"
(Culture of Pain14). And Elaine Scarry, as the title of her bookThe
Body in Painalready indicates, develops this notion of a proprietary
relationshipintoacongruenceofthebodywith"its"pain.Thereisalot
to say about the cultural work performed by such proprietary cum
(^79) Iamusingtheterm"reflexive"inwaysinspiredbyUlrichBeck,namely"self-
confrontation with the effects" of an earlier condition (in Beck's case
modernization) which "cannot be dealt with and assimilated in the system," in
ourcaseofthenormallyfunctioningbody(6).